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President's Letter:

Bill Richardson (bill@drca.org)

June 2024

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A lot has been happening affecting our neighborhood since our last meeting.  Our board has been actively working with County staff and other civic associations on a wide range of issues, including staffing for a study of whether to adopt further restrictions on lot coverage (or “footprint”), height, and setbacks for residential properties (both single family and “missing middle”); addressing traffic and speeding issues on key roads in our neighborhood; completing the design of the traffic circle at Military and Nelly Custis prior to soliciting bids for that project, which has both support and criticism from DRCA members; monitoring the progress of Donaldson Run stream restoration projects; supporting our congressional delegation’s effort to limit additional long distance flights over our neighborhood into  Reagan National Airport; and identifying ways we might be able to protect more of the diminishing tree canopy within the neighborhood. 

 

I hope you will make a special effort to attend our last meeting before summer vacation, which will be on Wednesday, June 12, again at Taylor School, beginning at 7:30 p.m. with a social half hour at 7:00.  We will be experimenting this time by also introducing the option of virtual participation by Zoom for those who cannot attend in person.  Please see the instructions in this newsletter for how to attend virtually.

 

After conducting our biennial elections (see below the slate proposed by our Nominating Committee), we will be hearing a report from our state delegate and senator, Patrick Hope and Barbara Favola,  about this year’s recently completed recent General Assembly session in Richmond.  We have periodically invited our state delegation to address you, and this is the first time we have done so since a   redistricting put us into Patrick’s district.  In light of increasing concerns about tree preservation, we will then hear from Vincent Verweij, the County’s Urban Forest Manager.

 

Patrick Hope has served in the House of Delegates since 2010.  He is a lawyer in the health care field, now chairs the House courts committee, and serves on the health and human services and public safety committees.  This year, we and others worked with him on a number of tree preservation bills.  He also introduced a bill, tabled til next year, to provide Arlington County with the authority (as in Fairfax County) to elect a County Board chair and members from specific geographic districts in the County (rather than at large).  Patrick was previously the first president of the Buckingham Community Civic Association.

 

Barbara Favola has been a state senator since 2012.  She once served as senior advisor at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, was a County Board member for 14 years, and now is chair of the state senate’s rehabilitation and social services committee.  Her particular focus has included women’s health and disability issues.  She also serves on Senate committees with jurisdiction over conservation and natural resources, education and health, and finance and appropriations. 

 

Vincent Verweij has responsibility for County programs governing trees on both public and private property.  He supervises four urban foresters and others on his staff.  Prior to his appointment as Urban Forest Manager in 2018, he worked as a County urban forester for seven years.  He is a certified arborist, graduated from Ohio State University with a major in GIS mapping and a minor in natural resources management, and then received a master’s degree from Virginia Tech in natural resources management and policy.  Vincent’s team’s duties include tree care, reviewing developers’ tree canopy plans, protection for trees during construction, designating heritage and specimen trees, and helping implement the lot coverage and other aspects of the Forestry and Natural Resources Plan adopted by the County Board last December.

 

We encourage you to come to our meeting on June 12 (in person or virtually) with questions for our speakers, who will be there to address all these issues of direct interest to you.   

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